Debra Marshall first fell in love with the Southeast Alaska State Fair 43 summers ago, when she was still living in Juneau and was the new parent of a six-month-old.
“I put my daughter on the ferry, and we slept on [the top deck].” Marshall recounted this week, about that first fair experience, four decades ago. “It rained, I was carrying my baby on my back, and I still had a good time, eating and dancing.”
She was hooked, and every year after would get her daughter and daughter’s friends on the ferry “no matter what” each summer. It was an atmosphere she didn’t want them to miss out on.
“Even to this day, it’s still a safe place for kids to just run around with squirt guns,” Marshall said. “They can disappear from their parents and come back — to my knowledge we’ve never lost a kid. There’s not a device in anyone’s hand. It’s a simple pleasure.”
Marshall moved to Haines full-time roughly 20 years after that first fair. She’s been volunteering since, including serving a decade on the board of the fair. That meant some sacrifice, given she could’ve been attending the fair all the same, without volunteering.
Volunteering meant a “marathon of hours” around fair time, and for a number of years, Marshall said, she and other volunteers would have to tuck away in the fair office into the early hours of the morning counting cash. Meanwhile, the fair would still be going strong all around them.
“Sometimes there would be a good band playing, and when we were counting money and everyone else was dancing, we didn’t love that,” Marshall said. But as she tells it, volunteering was a sacrifice at times, but also a payoff in itself.
Especially at the kids rides ticket booth, which was Marshall’s volunteer post of choice.
“They’ve saved their summer allowance for the rides, some can’t even see into the booth, but they reach up to put their dirty money onto the shelf and they’re just so excited,” Marshall said.
That’s the “secret potion,” of the fair in Marshall’s eyes: the excitement from the kids. That’s stayed true even as parts of the fair have changed across her four decades attending, like agricultural exhibits, which Marshall remembers being much bigger in the past. “Things are different, and that’s OK,” Marshall said. “We still have a hell of a lot of fun with squirt guns. There’s more music than there used to be, and the food is as good or better.”
And even as other forms of support have come and gone, volunteers have always returned, Marshall said. “No matter who the staff of the fair is, there’s this upwelling of community support that shows up and keeps it going.”
Marshall will be keeping her own volunteer streak going this year, and you can catch her emcee’ing the wearable arts event. Just like the first year, her daughter will also be attending, now with a toddler of her own — Marshall’s four-year-old grandson, who also went to his first fair at six months old. It runs in the family.